The ALTIS Kinogram Method reads sprint mechanics from five frames of a single gait cycle: toe-off, maximum vertical projection, strike, touch-down, and full support. Three are stance positions and two are flight positions. Pull those five frames from a side-on slow-motion video and you have a one-page picture of how an athlete sprints.
Where the method comes from
The method was developed at ALTIS by Dan Pfaff and Stuart McMillan, and it exists to solve a practical coaching problem: sprinting happens far too fast to evaluate by eye, and watching a clip on loop rarely produces agreement between two coaches. Fixing the analysis to five defined positions makes the conversation repeatable. Everyone is looking at the same instant, named the same way, so "his touch-down is out in front" becomes a claim you can point at rather than a feeling.
The positions are checkpoints, not a score. There is no pass mark for a kinogram, and the method is a way of seeing rather than a test to fail.
The five positions in cycle order
1. Toe-off (stance)
The last frame before the support foot leaves the ground. This is the end of the athlete's ability to apply force in that step, so it shows what the push actually produced: how much the hip has extended, where the free thigh has travelled to by the time ground contact ends, and whether the athlete leaves the ground in a posture they can recover from.
2. Maximum vertical projection (flight)
The top of the flight phase, identified by the frame where both feet are parallel to the ground. That parallel-feet definition is the practical trick of the method, because "the highest point" is nearly impossible to eyeball reliably, while two feet lining up is obvious in a single frame. MVP is where you read how much of the athlete's mechanics happen in front of the body, and how the swing leg is being folded up and carried forward.
3. Strike (flight)
The frame where the opposite thigh is perpendicular to the ground. The definition deliberately uses the opposite leg, because judging the position from the striking leg itself is much harder to do consistently. Strike is the frame just before the athlete commits to the next contact, so it shows the setup for that contact: what the front leg is doing as it starts down, and whether the athlete is reaching or letting the ground come to them.
4. Touch-down (stance)
The first frame where the swing-leg foot meets the ground. This is the most commonly discussed frame of the five, because where the foot lands relative to the body sets up everything that follows. A contact made too far in front of the athlete's centre of mass produces braking; a contact made close to underneath preserves speed.
5. Full support (stance)
The frame where the foot is directly under the pelvis, with the toe plumb vertical below the ASIS (the bony point at the front of the hip). Full support is the mid-stance checkpoint, and it shows how the athlete organises themselves at the moment of peak load: posture through the trunk and pelvis, and how much the support leg gives way under it.
Filming a sprint you can actually read
The kinogram is only as good as the video underneath it, and most unusable footage fails for the same handful of reasons:
- Shoot from the side, perpendicular to the runway. Any angle from the front or behind distorts the joint angles that the whole method depends on.
- Use the highest frame rate your phone offers, 120 or 240 fps. At 30 fps a full sprint cycle is only a few frames long, and the exact instant of toe-off or touch-down often simply is not in the footage.
- Fill the frame with the athlete and hold the phone steady, ideally on a tripod. Panning is fine; wobbling is not.
- Capture max velocity, not the start, if you want to compare against the standard positions. The acceleration phase has different mechanics and different expectations.
- Keep the setup identical between sessions. Same distance, same height, same angle. Two kinograms are only comparable if the camera was.
Pulling the five frames
In Coach Video Analysis this is the built-in kinogram export, so there are no screenshots and no collage app in the loop:
- Load the sprint clip and watch it once at full speed.
- Slow the playback down and use the frame-step buttons to land on toe-off exactly. Tapping steps one frame; holding steps continuously.
- Tap F to add that frame to the kinogram.
- Repeat for MVP, strike, touch-down, and full support.
- Open the Kinogram screen, drop any frame you missed, pick Horizontal or Vertical, and save. You get one image in Photos.
Two details that make the result more useful: add Markup angles or a vertical reference line to the video before capturing frames and they are baked into the kinogram, which is how you show a thigh angle or a plumb line at full support. And because the app syncs two videos to one timeline, you can put this month's sprint next to last month's and step both to the same position before capturing.
If what you care about is timing rather than positions, use a chronogram instead: it samples frames at equal intervals automatically rather than making you pick them.
Build sprint kinograms in Coach Video Analysis
Frame-accurate stepping at 1/16 speed, one-tap frame capture, angle and reference-line markup that carries into the exported strip, and two-video sync for before-and-after comparisons. On iPhone, iPad, and Mac, free to download.
